• ESPAÑOL: Oración creyente

A while back, my daughter was having a problem with her teeth. I felt that my wife and I should lay hands on her and pray for her.

But as I started to pray a strange thing happened, I realized almost immediately, that I did not have the faith to pray for her healing.

Admittedly, I had some unbelief.

So what did I do?

Well, instead, I chose to pray the one thing that I did have faith for and that was she would be able to see the dentist early, within a day or so.

Now some may not look at this as much of a miracle, but booking our family dentist is challenging. They are popular, always busy and hard to get in, and typically your bookings are two to three weeks out.

My daughter called the next day and that very morning she had her first appointment, I suspect because of a cancellation.

I share this story because it emphasizes at least to me the importance of faith in prayer.

I believe the Holy Spirit is urging people to pray more individually and corporately. But if we are not careful, prayer can end up being a bunch of meaningless and empty words that will have no impact. Jesus said, “And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do. For they think that they will be heard for their many words” (Matthew 6:7).

In other words, it is not the quantity of our prayer that is effective, but rather the quality, and with that in mind, I want to talk about one key to increasing the quality of our prayers.

It must be believing prayer.

Jesus said, “whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours” (Mark 11:24).

When we enter a time of prayer, it must be accompanied by a deliberate act of faith.

But notice how Jesus says that we must believe that the prayer has already been answered. We need to envision our prayer as ‘fait accompli’, which according to the American Heritage Dictionary is a French idiom that means “something that has already occurred; a done deal.”

This is believing prayer.

Throwing up words into the sky is meaningless, without a conscious act of faith accompanying our prayer.